It has been discussed a hundred times on this blog and at many other places that the raid design of World of Warcraft puts a lot of responsibility on the tanks and healers, and much less of it on the damage dealing classes. With the predictable result that people tend to shout at the tanks and healers after a wipe, and then tanks and healers are increasingly hard to find. So what if a game came and reversed that? What if tanking and healing was relatively easy, and fails were predominantly caused by the damage dealers not dealing enough damage per second? Well, what would happen would be that damage dealers would be extremely unhappy, and even the monkeys would be screaming how bad a game design that was.

I must say that even as a healer I didn't enjoy WoW raids like Malygos where an enrage timer meant that we wiped when the damage dealers collectively failed to deal enough damage. There is something inherently frustrating about going from being proud to have kept the whole raid alive, to the raid wiping 2 seconds later due to the enrage timer. But then this was WoW, and damage dealers weren't supposed to have any responsibility. People who didn't want to take responsibility chose to play damage dealers in World of Warcraft.

If Star Wars: The Old Republic has enrage timers on all hardmode flashpoints, maybe that attitude will change. It might take some time for the people who were looking for the easy job in the raid to realize that they should have taken a tank or healer instead of a damage dealer, and vice versa. And there will be a lot of hand-wringing about the fact that SWTOR doesn't have damage meters, so you can only say with certitude that your damage dealers collectively failed, without being able to point the finger at an individual. But for the long-term social health of the game, I think this is just the ticket. The very fact that you can't blame a single guy could should make raiding a better experience for everybody. And by the responsibility being distributed among all the damage dealers, there is more room for variations in performance, without one player having a bad day causing a major guild drama.

So while I do agree that enrage timers are a somewhat lazy design tool, I do very much like the consequences of this shift in responsibility. It should allow some players to rethink why exactly they chose a specific role in the holy trinity. And in the long term it should solve the eternal tank and healer shortage most other MMORPGs have.
- posted by Tobold Stoutfoot @ 8:48 AM Permanent Link
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Well I've said it before, scrap the holy trinity altogether.

It's not that easy I know but it can't be impossible. I wish devs would think a bit outside the box.

I hear that GW2 will let everyone heal themselves to some degree. It will be interesting to see how that works.

I disagree that not giving the players access to combat logs will make for a better group experience. It severely hamstrings the ability for a group to analyse a wipe. It'll lead to either instances being designed around people performing in an extremely sub par manner. (i.e. that juggernaut that just spams assault because they played Diablo II as their last major MMO) or groups breakdown because they can't realistically make any sharper analysis than "we need to push buttons better." Combined with an inability to track interrupts, damage intake, or cc breaking, I've watched some groups break down startlingly quickly because the players are fumbling around like it's molten core.

The funny thing about this is that it's exactly what my guild has been encountering in our raids... but also, that we have a really hard time finding enough DPS.

We have too many tanks. Too many heals. Not enough DPS. And that's with the mains everyone just plain started with, BEFORE getting into end-game. So, not only is DPS being held accountable for once (about god damn time), something else has been encouraging people (our people, anyway) into tank/heal roles early.

Thing is... Making one group that has always been irresponsible suddenly more responsible is probably just make them go elsewhere to slack off.

Tobold, you're wrong but I'll have to write a blog post to explain it. a) dps has been more important in WoW raids than tanking or healing for awhile now and b) it's actually much much harder to be top notch dps than to be a decent tank or healer which means that this type of design can be amazingly unforgiving for 'normal' competent players if the devs overtune it (which they have here)

The requirement to be responsible is fine, but if you require some roles to be totally kitted out in top gear where others can just roll in and do their bit, something in the design is off.

There's a number of hard mode bosses in SWTOR that has enranged timers (Republic commando boss guy and Padawan boss girl [can't remember their names]), and at least two of them are present in the first hard mode for the Imperial side - Boarding Party.

The first time I attempted that, in fresh 50 gear as a BH dps, we wiped due to the enrage timer. However, I was able to optimize my rotation slightly during our next try and it was a walk in the park.

While the existence of enraged timers serves to make the DPS classes not slack, I'm not in favor of enraged timers on the whole. It used to be exhilarating to down a boss underleveled and undergeared, taking a tremendous amount of time and feeling like you've really accomplished something. 10 min enraged timers took that feel away.

Tanks tended to have a lot of responsibilities in 5-mans, where they basically need to know the entire instance before they ever do it.

But in raids DPS did tend to have a lot of responsibility. I want to say (memory fading, fortunately) that every Icecrown fight I did except one had at least one DPS Do-Or-Wipe mechanic. And you were always knee-deep in your rotation and needing to react to timers and popping abilities and trinkets at the right time.

Compare that to the main tank, who needs to stay awake but generally just sits in one place and does their thing.

I disagree that not giving the players access to combat logs will make for a better group experience. It severely hamstrings the ability for a group to analyse a wipe.

Well, at least admit that the way WoW handles feedback from combat isn't ideal. Why do we only get data enabling us to rank people by damage per second output, but not data on who took unnecessary damage or otherwise played badly? There are some very well known and funny posts on various blogs describing on how to top various damage or healing meters by playing extremely badly.

I can understand you wanting feedback from a fight, but what we get in WoW is very limited and bad feedback only leading us into the wrong direction. It never tells us whether somebody died because he played badly, or whether he died because the healer played badly, and thus the healer gets the blame all the time.

@Tobold: any semi-competent raid leader/player can see from recount if a player took avoidable damage and how much of it. For DPS, when doing Spine, nobody gives a damn about your DPS, it's only the DPS on tendons that people look at (again, easily visible with recount).

The reason DPS are less accountable, is because there's more of them, so it's usually a shared responsibility.

But in raids DPS did tend to have a lot of responsibility. I want to say (memory fading, fortunately) that every Icecrown fight I did except one had at least one DPS Do-Or-Wipe mechanic. And you were always knee-deep in your rotation and needing to react to timers and popping abilities and trinkets at the right time.

Compare that to the main tank, who needs to stay awake but generally just sits in one place and does their thing.

Agreed. It's been like this since TBC. I've played tank/healer/DD there and DD was hardest, healer was easy and tank was completely trivial. This didn't change in WotLK and in Cata healers were hardest, DDs didn't change, and tanks were still completely trivial.

Unfortunaletly some memories, like those in BWL, seem to stick to peoples' minds like some kind of glue.

As for five-mans: These are and always were most difficult for the tank. ... Assuming there's some kind of 'difficulty' left in 5-mans nowadays - which is hell of an assumption ;)

The feedback part has been better in the Dragon Soul raid. If you die you sometimes get a warning that gives you a hint as to what to try differently. And the combat log has been improved tremendously since vanilla. If I want to look up how I died, it's a quick 10 second check and then I can look up the spell in the dungeon journal or ask my guild what I could do differently to not die the same way.

It can be better, but at the same time it shouldn't tell me exactly what to do. There's already enough of that on the Internet at large.

And lastly, as has already been commented, without the ability to recognize the points of failure (e.g., which dps aren't doing as well they potentially could be) it would be a madenning experience to recognize a problem. You can't solve a problem you don't know. And saying, "the dps is too low" when there are two or more dps present. Too high level to solve the problem effectively. It's not about making someone feel bad; if I am the one not doing well enough, I'd like to know.

@Tobold: you probably didn't play WoW raiding for long. Recount and other damage meter addons DO show damage taken from various (including avoidable) sources. Also it has a "death log" that shows the last 10 seconds of the dead, with incoming damage and heal.

If you see guy getting 4 pulses of unavoidable and no heal: healer fail. Guy getting huge damage from fire in the ground: his fail.

@Gevlon: The addon BEING ABLE to display failure, and people correctly looking at it to see who failed are two very different things. For example there is a blog run by a certain Gevlon who repeatedly posts screenshots of damage per second and rails about "doing less damage than the tank", without ever looking at these more meaningful statistics.

Once upon a time in Norrath, damage dealers did have a responsibility--to not do too much damage and pull aggro, die, and wipe the group. But then we got not only dps meters but threat meters and that went away.

Enrage timers don't do anything but create a gear requirement. They don't put any responsibility on DPS during the actual fight other than to spam their rotation.

> Why do we only get data enabling us to rank people by damage per second output, but not data on who took unnecessary damage or otherwise played badly?

That is not true. Damage meters display damage taken by boss abilities (data on who took unnecesary damage), damage done to relevant targets, damage done to irrelevant targets (data on who played badly) and so on. Maybe your average PuG leader can only look at overall DPS, but able raid leaders on organized guilds (and experienced players) need to be able to analyze causes of wipes if they want to be successful.

On the main topic, at least on HM progression DPS have a good share of responsability: low DPS performance on leads to wipes. And by low DPS performance I'm not talking only about overall DPS (although DPS on the boss also matters).

@Tobold (regarding Gevlon), just because the damage done is not the only thing that matters, doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all. If an analysis of how well did a player in an encounter is needed, both his DPS and his ability to execute the encounter have to be checked.

@Tobold: You're being overly pedantic here though. Just because he doesn't post the damage taken meters in his posts doesn't mean that he doesn't look at them. It also might be that Gevlon's is posting cases where DPS is all that matters, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, a DPS who does less DPS than the tank is failing a huge section of his responsibility even if he takes minimal damage overall.

Also, in all of the hardcore raiding guilds I been in throughout WoW, all of them took into account the various responsibilities of DPS, including damage taken. The DPS teams may have the least individual responsibility, but that doesn't stop hardcore raiding guilds put heavy emphasis on each individual DPSer to play to the best of their abilities.

I'm sorry, but thinking that DPSers choose to be DPS in order to avoid responsibility makes me think you're a little out of touch with raiders, Tobold.

I just wish the game itself gave better feedback to players as to how well they are playing. Something in-game, as opposed to depending on external addons - if they exist for that game.

Better feedback (along with better in-game instruction) would help new (poor) players play better (hopefully). I think most games simply don't provide enough in-game feedback or instruction to their players. And I have played many - including WoW and SWTOR.

It could be something simple like a glowing symbol (or combat text) that starts red, but changes color through to green when you are approaching your class/spec optimal throughput for dps/heals/threat. Maybe have it affected by taking avoidable damage. If you are in the green, you are doing well.

Maybe that could translate to a colored dot on the raid frame for each player that everyone can see. Everyone is green? Everyone is playing optimally.

thinking that DPSers choose to be DPS in order to avoid responsibility makes me think you're a little out of touch with raiders

Then explain why there is always a lack of tanks and healers and too many dps, and why healers and tanks get the most blame in a group situation. There is no good explanation for these facts other than that dps have less responsibility.

In 5-man dungeon finder groups there are certainly more DPSers than the 60% ratio needed to form a group. Tanks tend to have the shortest queues for sure. In this case I think you're right and DPSers tend to have less responsibility. Tanks have the most in a 5-man group which can help explain the discrepancy.

But when you move away from specifically 5-man pugs I think your reasoning falls away. My guild was constantly trying to recruit competent DPSers because there simply weren't enough of them. To succeed in hard mode raids you need your DPSers to really be on the ball. They have to 'do the dance' while still outputting extremely high damage to beat the timers. And they have to hit the right targets.

Were they more responsible for winning than tanks or healers? I'm not sure I'd go that far but they certainly weren't less responsible. You needed all 10 people to be well geared and playing near optimally to have a chance. As far as 'blame' goes we tended to blame the DPSers more than the tanks or healers. But then we actually made use of the tools available to dig deeper than just a DPS number to find out why we were losing.

"Well, at least admit that the way WoW handles feedback from combat isn't ideal. Why do we only get data enabling us to rank people by damage per second output, but not data on who took unnecessary damage or otherwise played badly? There are some very well known and funny posts on various blogs describing on how to top various damage or healing meters by playing extremely badly.

I can understand you wanting feedback from a fight, but what we get in WoW is very limited and bad feedback only leading us into the wrong direction. It never tells us whether somebody died because he played badly, or whether he died because the healer played badly, and thus the healer gets the blame all the time."

Perhaps you can only find Damage per second in the combat log, but that's a problem with the user, not the tool.

Using recount, I can find out if someone took a hit from avoidable damage, I can find out if they died from said avoidable damage, I can find out who broke CC, I can find out who missed an interrupt, I can find out who didn't use their potions, I can find out who who's mismanaging their damage rotation, I can find out who's not adjusting their healing throughput to account for high damage phases, I can find out who's mistiming their raid CDs, if a tank's letting their debuffs fall off, if a tank or DPS is short of a major statistical cap, who didn't push their extra action button on the Ultraxion and Deathwing encounters, who wasn't switching to adds, who was AoEing to pad the meters at the expense of useful damage, who is taking too long to get in position, who's letting their uptime on the target lag.

Give me the combat log and I can tell you exactly what went wrong and what steps need to be taken to compensate. Sometimes poor damage is a problem. I didn't know there were enrage timers in ToR until my 5th HM Flash, coincidentally, that was the first time I pugged players who weren't raiders with my WoW guild. For my first batch of Flashpoints, the entire group was in questing gear, the two DPS were a Juggernaut in tanking gear and an operative in healing gear who respecced DPS because we were the first batch to hit 50. We never saw an enrage timer. We could certainly have optimized our rotations more if we had access to the logs, but for the most part, the rotations are pretty common sense.

Then I decided to try and crank out my daily, and I pugged a couple of almost full champion gear DPS, and they couldn't DPS their way out of a paper bag. We hit the enrage on the second boss of AthissHM three times before I couldn't figure out which DPS was the problem, so I kicked them both when my guild members logged on. If I had the combat log, I could have diagnosed which DPS was not performing to requirements, and either educated him, or replaced just him. Instead, both DPS, one of whom might have been doing just fine, got thrown out. And it sucks. I hate not being able to give better advice than "You need to do more damage."

See, I read Screaming Monkey's post, and came to a totally different conclusion. While I'm not saying that a shift of responsibility would be a bad thing, I don't see that as the core issue in the SW:TOR Hardmode flash points.

As a commenter there said, WotLK taught us that hardmode 5 mans aren't really....hard. They are more like “Slightly more difficult than when you just waltzed through, but still a pushover.”

It seems to me that there's a perception by the playerbase of what content is really supposed to be "hard" and what isn't, despite its nomenclature in-game.

When players wipe continuously in a hard mode raids, they think, "Well yeah, it's hard mode, it's not supposed to be a pushover."

But when doing hard mode 5 mans and they fail, suddenly it's bad game design.

Why should players be requried to do content labeled as "hard mode", then go back to normal mode for the next tier, then hard again, etc. Just as in a single player game, if a player wants only normal or "easy" content, shouldn't they just be able to do that? If a player wants to raid "normal mode", why should they have to do "hard mode" ANYTHING?

"Then explain why there is always a lack of tanks and healers and too many dps..."

I pretty much run PUGs exclusively. For me personally, I don't dare tank a dungeon until I know it and am geared very well (possibly even just a bit overgeared) for it. I won't want to heal it until I have very good gear for it too. Anyone else feeling that way would mean one less healer or tank for the queue until they get geared better and more familiar with the fight mechanics.

"and why healers and tanks get the most blame in a group situation."

In the Heroic PUGs and LFR groups I've been in, I honestly think that DPS has been blamed more often than tanks or healers for failures lately. Unnecessary deaths/damage intake or lack of DPS in general are probably the most frequent complaints.

When I DPS, it's not because I don't want responsibility. It's my job to make things go down, to CC things off the healer when the tank is not paying attention. To heal myself up a bit or use damage reducing abilities when needed. That's why I love DPS classes like the Death Knight and Shaman (among others) - there's a lot you can do as DPS to make a run go smoothly. Not everyone chooses to of course, but I can critique just as many tanks and healers just as harshly for their lack of using abilities available to them.

Those are two completely different demographics. Look at MMOChamps latest stats. <4K character completed heroic madness (where DPS matters) and 400K for the normal mode (where DPS doesn't matter so much). Even looking at that, it's under 5% of the entire playerbase that has completed a "regular" raid.

If only 5% of your customer based used the item you spend 90% of your time developing, it's gotta make you wonder what the heck is going on.

Look at it this way, if you upped the damage a tank did to compensate for the DPS numbers and didn't add a single extra ability (CC, interrupt, etc...) a tank and healer could take on any content. DPS add nothing to the table BUT damage, in the majority of consumer content.

Less than half the game's player base has made it out of Twilight Highlands. Does that mean that leveling content needs to be made easier?

raiding is not for everyone. Not everyone is going to even attempt DS, so you get a very skewed perspective when you look at DW kills as a percentage of all subscribers. It's be more accurate to look at DW kills as a percentage of groups raiding DS.

I don't think the problem is the enrage timers exactly -- the problem is the lack of a combat log/damage meters. People have no idea that they are doing bad DPS or why (spec? rotation? gear? etc.)

In fact the only place you can kind of test your DPS is in the Warzones -- you need to use some common sense regarding up-time obviously, but if you are doing 50-100k more damage (end of match WZ summary) with a different spec/rotation, you can be fairly sure that it is better for PvE DPS too.

Another issue is likely the gearing up at 50 -- the Auction House (Galactic Trade Network) is pretty awful to use and a lot of people may not realize that they can get some pretty good upgrades to their leveling gear.

Either way, along with the myriad of bugs that do cause wipes in HMs (I have DPS'd and Healed them all, for the record), these issues are all significant design flaws in SWTOR.

The very fact that you can't blame a single guy could should make raiding a better experience for everybody.

This is one of the most outlandish claims I have ever seen in print. It is like saying that standardized testing is better when you don't know which questions you got wrong, and the grade is either Pass or Fail.

How is a DPS supposed to know whether they are doing their rotations correctly without feedback? How is a group supposed to know what to change to succeed? Any "guild drama" that results from being able to pinpoint the person who consistently fails is due to a failure in group composition - a mismatching of players who don't care that much about the game and players that do. It is better to get all those feelings out in the open ASAP instead of the passive-aggressive drama that seeps into the guild culture later on.

Make DPS have some responsibility, or make no one have responsibility.

If DPS has responsibility, then a lot of players will stop playing, as they are bad at video games and the game is no longer letting them win.

If no one has responsibility, then the game bacomes a facebook game where you can afk your way to victory. In which case what exactly is the point?

I would say that having DPS have some responsibility is definitely the way to go. Not in the form of enrage timers, though those are good for setting a minimum level of competency, but in the form of CC and other class mechanics which healers and tanks would not get. Or perhaps the boss has several abilities which are used more and more often as group DPS gets lower. This puts extra strain on healers and eventually will cause a wipe.

I don't think a game without any responsibility from some players in a group setting is a good thing, and I don't think a game without any responsibility from anyone can even be called a game. It then becomes just an activity.

Then explain why there is always a lack of tanks and healers and too many dps, and why healers and tanks get the most blame in a group situation. There is no good explanation for these facts other than that dps have less responsibility.

Because some people like to see big pew pew numbers, and others like the sense that they are healing? As a feral druid, I've had the opportunity to be both a MT and a DPS during large portions of my raiding experience, and I love being DPS not because of the lessened responsibility, but the huge critz and competing against the other DPSers in my raid for topping chartz. I didn't go DPS to "avoid responsibility".

Some people just don't find being the punching bag for the rest of the raid.

I know this is a huge generalization, but why is it that female gamers tend to play healers over DPS? Are you willing to argue that female gamers are all playing healers because they like taking on the added responsibility of being a healer, instead of the much simpler idea that they just like the role of a healer?

Tobold, in reading this post and you responses to the comments I have to earnestly wonder if you're trolling or if WoW raiding is a particular blind spot of yours. I try to explain why below.

First, the claim that Recount and similar tools "only get data enabling us to rank people by damage per second output, but not data on who took unnecessary damage" is false and, for anybody that has used Recount for ten minutes, obviously so. If your intent with this comment was to provoke your readers, well done, but it's a technique that doesn't fit with an online persona that is ordinarily characterized by being reasonable and honest.

Going further, you note that "the addon BEING ABLE to display failure, and people correctly looking at it to see who failed are two very different things". While it's true that using Recount incorrectly will produce a distorted view of the raid's successfulness, this is blaming the tool for the failure of the user. Wearing your glasses backwards will also give you a distorted view of the world, but nobody blames this on the lenses.

Recount is a tool for raiding. Among those mature and enligtened enough to use it correctly, it's a tool for good. Among the wicked, it can be a kind of cudgel to beat over the heads of others (deservedly or otherwise).

If the group you are in is misusing Recount, maybe the problem is the idiots you play with and not an addon.

I bet everybody who complained about my statements in this thread is playing a dps class as main.

Is saying that the bankers are responsible for the financial crisis "trolling the bankers"?

I have been playing healers and tanks since my first character, a druid in Everquest. And there have been thousands of situations where I have been unjustly blamed by dps players for their own failures. I've even been shouted at for keeping the tank alive and winning the fight by some dps who couldn't control his aggro and died. In my personal experience among the dps players there is a rather high percentage of spoiled kids who would like to get all the rewards of the game handed to them on a silver platter without having to take any responsibility.

Listen to any chat channel in any MMORPG where people are looking for groups, and there will always be a large number of shouts for tanks and healers, and very few calls for dps players. And that although in all these games over 50% of the spots in a group go to dps players. That isn't just different people preferring different roles. That is a mass movement guided by the incentives of the game. If you have a system where everybody gets paid the same at the end of the day, then people will seek out the easiest job there is to get to that pay. And in MMORPGs that is damage dealer.

I agree that enrage timers are a bit dull. As an alternative, could it be a workable solution to reward good dps in other ways? An example: as your dps goes up, you gain "freneticism" (frenzy is taken :)), a state that decreases your damage taken, or actively heals you (but only you). This gives a double bonus, in that it offloads healers' work while encouraging dps to do better. Aggro balancing could be the devs' tuning device.

Combine it with making all healers "monk" types that heal by beating bad guys with a stick and you're maybe even starting down the path of getting rid of the trinity.

Arguing that one role should have the responsibility for succeeding in an encounter is not entirely unlike that one participant in sexual intercourse should have the sole responsibility for making it good.

Good group combat, like good sex, is a matter of shared effort (and shared reward). Instance and raid encounters should be designed so that tanks, healers and DPSers can help each other out, instead of playing their own mini-games.

In case of SWTOR hardmode flashpoints, the obvious solution is to replace hard enrage timers with soft enrage (either via a stacking buff on boss or through faster add spawns).

It's interesting how from the comments you can see who actually plays in the raiding game and who doesn't....

If you collect information over all the posts:- "healers have no responsibility and BTW I played on and it was easy"- "tanks have no responsibility and BTW it's so easy to play one"- "dps have no responsibility, and all you have to do is do your cycle"

All of these may be true in 5-men, but reality of raiding, even not at the top level, just HM, is very much different....

All of these may be true in 5-men, but reality of raiding, even not at the top level, just HM, is very much different.

And the people complaining about DPS having responsibility for the success of a group in SWTOR are talking about hardmode flashpoints, which are the equivalent to heroics, not raiding. So the comparison with WoW 5-men is totally justified. Raiding isn't everything.

I bet everybody who complained about my statements in this thread is playing a dps class as main.It's a good thing for you it was just a figure of speech because you'd lose what you bet.

Is saying that the bankers are responsible for the financial crisis "trolling the bankers"?That's irrelevant, I don't see you or anyone else doing it.

I understand you get more comments from raiders than non-raiders because the former are more likely to read blogs and comment and you want to provide an opposing viewpoint. However, I also think you fail to acknowledge the existence of the other viewpoint (which is the one I take too). In current WoW raids everyone's responsible for the success including DPS - and it coincides with the fact that groups looking for DPS are more frequent in the raids than they are in non-raid content.

If you first limit yourself to raiding, then limit yourself to organized raiding and not LFR, then limit yourself to the top guilds and not the average ones, then you can come to a situation in which what I said in my original post is not true at all and DPS are quite rare and responsible for a raids success. But how many of the 11 million WoW players are that?

When I talk about WoW, I am not talking about a tiny elite in their ivory towers. I am talking about the experience of the average player, who will more often see irresponsible DPS in a 5-man group than responsible DPS in an elite hardmode raid.

What you are doing is arguing that poverty doesn't exist in the US by citing only examples from Beverly Hills. That simply isn't relevant for the 99%.

Tobold: the thing is, I don't think any of us would believe a large majority of DPSers would choose to tank/heal even if it was a class of lesser responsibility.

I'm not sure why you think class choice is driven by how much responsibility they'll have when they group up in raids. If anything, that's the last thing on their minds at the class selection screen, especially for the majority where raiding is the last thing on their minds anyways. Why would you think player responsibility plays a bigger factor in class selection than playstyle (would I rather be a guy who sits there and can't hit for crap, or long range cannon pewpew!?) or personal interests (would I rather be the guy who sits there and gets hit vs DUDE I can stealth and be a ninja killer!)?

If you have a system where everybody gets paid the same at the end of the day, then people will seek out the easiest job there is to get to that pay.

The problem with this statements is that you make huge assumptions.

You assume that the people don't care what they do in their job, just that it's easy. That might be a fair assumption if everyone was a robot, but they're not. What they class they are matters to them.

This also changes the worth in the pay as well. If I only like to DPS, then I'm going to roll the class that is going to get paid in DPS gear.

Finally, you assume that people are driven by pay. But if you take out the hardcore and leave nothing but the casuals, then pay has nothing to do with it. They'll do whatever they want and they'll have fun doing it. Ask your wife why she plays MMOs and what "drove" her in WoW.

I have been playing healers and tanks since my first character, a druid in Everquest.